IdeaStorm and IdeaExchange are two examples of public Salesforce Ideas communities. They live out on the web, visible to Customers, Press, Analysts, or Prospects to see. This model offers the lowest barriers so generally these communities have lots of activity. For example Dell has had seven thousand votes and a half a million votes in the first 6 months. People link to this content and it gets picked up in search which in turn can generate leads. There is also a huge PR value if you can harness a vibrant community of customer evangelist.

While we are going to work towards public sites, the current product is focused on private sites for customers, partners and employees. This model is similar to Facebook or Netflix, where you might have some teaser information on the registration page, but to engage with the community you have to login.

There are at least three ways to use your landing page to entice your users to login. The first is through good old marketing. You can create static content which introduces the community, the key value proposition, and how it works. That's what they've done in the Netflix example below.

The next approach would be to incorporate a blog into your registration page. On your blog you can highlight interesting posts from your community, profile top contributors, and talk about ideas your company has acted upon. People could subscribe to your blog to get updates on what's going on and maybe you could even present a question of the week. If your looking for a good on-demand blogging application I'd recommend talking a look at typepad or wordpress, both are great applications.

The third approach to teasing information is to use the Salesforce API to pull out the top ideas and present them on your registration page. This approach requires a little development work, but it is relatively easy as long as you limit the scope to a couple of views, say your recent and popular ideas.

These three approaches should all work pretty well and will allow you to get your feet wet. Once again if you are excited about the idea of public sites and want to see us build it natively on the platform, vote it up on the IdeaExchange.